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Pope Calls Any Denial of Holocaust ‘Intolerable’

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI, meeting with Jews in an effort to mend fences after lifting the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who has publicly denied the scale of the Holocaust, said Thursday that the Roman Catholic Church was “profoundly and irrevocably committed” to rejecting anti-Semitism.

He also condemned Holocaust denial as “intolerable and altogether unacceptable,” and said it should “be clear to everyone,” especially to clergy members, that the Holocaust was “a crime against God and humanity.”

Addressing a delegation of 60 from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group, the pope also said that he planned to visit Israel.

Many in the Jewish delegation responded positively to the pope’s remarks. Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who addressed the pope at Thursday’s audience, called them “a wonderful step in terms of healing a tremendous strain.” The remarks were among the strongest by the pope in statements in recent weeks after he provoked global outrage by rehabilitating a bishop excommunicated in 1988 for being consecrated without a papal mandate by the leader of the Society of St. Pius X. That group was founded in rejection to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which included absolving Jews of responsibility for the crucifixion.

The bishop, Richard Williamson, said in an interview broadcast last month that the Nazi gas chambers never existed and that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust numbered only several hundred thousand.

Photo

In this photo provided by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI received a gift from Rabbi Arthur Schneier, senior Rabbi at Park East Synagogue in New York, left, and Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, during a meeting with American Jewish leaders at the Vatican on Thursday.Credit
L'Osservatore Romano, via Associated Press

Benedict has said he removed the excommunications as a gesture of “compassion” to help heal the only formal schism in the Roman Catholic Church, and Vatican officials said he was not aware of the bishop’s stance on the Holocaust. The Vatican has now said that Bishop Williamson must renounce his remarks before he can serve as a clergyman.

In his remarks on Thursday, Benedict reaffirmed the church’s commitment to “Nostra Aetate,” the Vatican II document absolving Jews of deicide, calling it “a milestone in the journey towards reconciliation” between Catholics and Jews.

Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s international director of interreligious affairs, said that for him the matter was now closed. “I don’t think there’s anything more to ask of the Vatican concerning this episode, other than to see how negotiations with the St. Pius X Society move ahead, or not,” he said.

But Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who also attended the audience, said he had hoped the pope would go even further, and excommunicate Bishop Williamson once again.

“You can’t condemn anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and then reinstate someone who’s a Holocaust denier,” Mr. Foxman said. He called the pope’s statements “significant and very important,” but said they “did not bring closure.”

After the global outcry over Bishop Williamson’s remarks in recent weeks, the Vatican has said that the members of the St. Pius X Society will have to accept the teachings of Vatican II in order to return to full communion with the church. This week, the bishop was removed as the head of his seminary in Argentina.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, on Thursday called the process by which the four bishops might be brought back to the church “a path that can now begin.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Pope, at Meeting With Jews, Rejects Denial of Holocaust. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe